“What to make of them now, embedded in a future they were meant to ensure?”

That’s the parting narration from director Sierra Pettingill’s 2022 documentary “Riotsville, U.S.A.,” which is playing at Portland’s Space on Friday. The film opens with the onscreen information that everything viewers are about to see is culled from archival material from the late 1960s, created by the U.S. military. The first image we’re greeted with is of a phony inner city, constructed of plywood and paint, and real glass, the facades of familiar establishments like bars, pawn shops and liquor stores.

Soon, milling bystanders form into groups, then angry groups. A very real window is smashed, and people rush into one of the flimsy edifices, emerging carrying a very real refrigerator. Police in military gear show up then, walking in practiced lockstep, spraying white gasses from tanks on their backs, their jeeps equipped with wide, protective scoop cages on their fronts. People are rushed, subdued, handcuffed. Several Black civilians are carted off to waiting police wagons, shouting and furious as the vehicles drive off. As it does, an arrested Black man raises a fist in triumph to an assembled crowd of military brass, sitting in prim rows on constructed bleachers. They laugh at the spectacle as rioters and police relax, their supposed clash revealed as mere artifice.

Welcome to Riotsville, U.S.A.

Constructed on military bases in the wake of the civil disturbances in Watts, Detroit and Newark in the mid-to-late ’60s, these Hollywood backlot faux inner cities were a training ground for police and the military to prepare to shut down any further such events. As Pettingill’s film shows, however, these structures and exercises were also training an entire nation how to view and process the growing dissatisfaction among the poor, the disenfranchised and, most importantly, the not-white. As the film’s narrator frames the grainy images, “A door swung open in the late ’60s and someone – something – sprang up and slammed it shut.”

Nobody likes a riot. Stuff gets broken, buildings burn. People die. But the underlying issues that incite a riot are complex, both in cause and especially in actual solutions. “Riotsville, U.S.A.” shows how the United States government, as cities burned with the pent-up rage and frustration of an entire segment of society, commissioned a long, hard look at the cause – and then abandoned every solution but police militarization and violence.

History lessons on film are a tough sell. Those dedicated to a blinkered, willful ignorance of the past will continue to call inconvenient facts “fake news,” while those who already agree with the film’s presentation of documented, systematic injustice are left to feel even less convinced that anything can change. “Riotsville, U.S.A.” takes a more impressionistic tack in tackling how this pivotal moment in American history pivoted – hard – into authoritarianism rather than the more comprehensive, humane and, yes, revolutionary path set out by a very unlikely source.

As the film presents, then-President Lyndon Johnson did what most politicians do when presented with a seemingly insoluble social problem. He formed a commission to study just why Black Americans and other oppressed people were lashing out against racism, police brutality, and economic oppression and inequality. The so-called Kerner Commission didn’t look like much on paper. Overwhelmingly white and hand-selected from the most moderate lawmakers Johnson could find, the commission yet emerged with a 700-page published report that stated in no uncertain terms that the real reasons for the growing unrest in American cities were the need for more jobs, affordable housing, school aid, a minimum livable income and the redress of unequal, often racially biased policing. As the film’s narrator puts it, this was a revolutionary statement of policy from “11 of the least revolutionary people in America.”

Of course, such fundamental truths are tougher to stomach than a top-down imposition or law and order above all else. And so the Kerner Commission’s findings (despite the published version outselling every book that year but Jaqueline Susann’s trash classic “Valley of the Dolls”), were whittled down to its one recommendation of greater equipment and funding of law enforcement. And thus the Riotvilles sprang up, with police departments from all over the country sending representatives to watch the pantomime riots, and take home lessons on how real disturbances are just as simple to understand, and just as easily solved at the barrel of a gun. “Dream riots,” as the narration continues, “A chessboard stage set. This is where the state assembles its fears.”

Unlike the phalanxes of armored police seen enacting their carefully rehearsed lessons on the very real streets of Chicago (at the contentious 1968 Democratic Convention) or Miami (where the GOP Convention’s choice to set up shop in the easily walled off peninsula there sees unrest erupt in neighboring communities), “Riotsville, “U.S.A.” is a patchwork of impressions and images. That can be as fascinating as it is unfocused, as when we watch B-roll of reporters prepping for a piece on the ungainly new riot control tank purchased by a local police department, or in the side-story of how PBS precursor Public Broadcasting Laboratory was shut down for, it’s implied, daring to have actual Black leaders take part in roundtable discussions about the riots.

But, as the narrator asks near the end of the 91-minute film, “A picture can become a stereotype – so do we just want more or different images?” The film is evocative without becoming didactic, the mosaic of news reports, training films, and raw footage of protests and the inevitable police responses coalescing into an evocative portrait of a society choosing to value repression and simplicity over innovation and progress. White housewives are shown lining up for police-sponsored pistol training. White police chiefs on panel shows deny they’ve ever seen police brutality, while deploying the scare tactic, “There’s one thin line between crime and society, and that’s us.” A chilling subplot of the Chicago convention is how the police initially deputized a 1,000-man “posse” of (mostly very eager-looking and white) civilians to patrol the streets. Plainclothes soldiers in the various Riotvilles are kitted out with “hippie” wigs, while government narrators blame nonexistent “outside agitators” (always the oppressor’s go-to boogeyman) for the play-acted violence.

Nobody needs help in drawing parallels to the place where we as a country are now. “Law and order” is conservatives’ unassailable slogan/threat, and the complexities of social unrest and protest are ignored. Certain politicians recruit civilian “poll watchers” to harass voters (in mostly non-white areas) purportedly in search of nonexistent voter fraud. Authority figures in law enforcement and government claim they’re only interested in keeping the peace, while judiciously and strategically pretending that popular uprisings and demonstrations have no cause other than lawlessness. With an election in the offing, candidates shift into pure “scare the white people” overdrive, campaign ads flooding the airwaves with scary-looking (non-white) threats and promising that only they can keep you safe.

It’s all so predictable. And, if you look back on the history of how America has greeted dissent and dissatisfaction with sledgehammer policy as “Riotsville, U.S.A.” does, you can see how it’s also so predetermined. “Flip a switch and end the problem,” the narrator muses, “Enforce contentment from above.” The thing is, simply crushing those airing real and tangible injustice with state-sponsored violence doesn’t bring peace, it crushes a nation’s soul. Assiduously rehearsed police violence kills real people while the all-too-real issues simmer away, waiting, inevitably, to explode again.

“Riotsville, U.S.A.” is playing at Space, 538 Congress St., Portland, at 7 p.m. Friday. Tickets are $9, $7 for Space members. For more information, go to space538.org.

Dennis Perkins is a freelance writer who lives in Auburn with his wife and cat.

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